WordPress Plugins To Help You Rank and Secure Your Site

Just so that you are aware I get asked a lot what plugins we use here on our blog. So below is a list of plugins we use; one thing you should note is not all the plugins listed below are specifically for website speed.

However we have researched and use the best plugins we feel that meets our websites’ needs. Where we have bloated plugins like Contact Form 7 and Contextual Related Posts we use Asset Clean Up to remove the plugins’ codes from pages where the scripts are not needed.

Plugins I use on this website
I’ve listed the plugins we use and the role they play on our website – you should only use and test plugins that you need and that works with your website.

Ad Inserter ( free and pro )
This plugin is more than AdSense plugin or plugin for ads. It provides many advanced options to insert opt-in forms, header scripts, Javascript, CSS, HTML, PHP, analytics, tracking or advert code anywhere on the page.

AdRotate ( free and pro )
With AdRotate you can easily place advertising banners pretty much anywhere on your website while managing everything from the easy to use dashboard. No fussing with your themes code or complex functions if you don’t want to.

Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Contextual Related Posts
Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed.

Cookie Notice
Cookie Notice allows you to elegantly inform users that your site uses cookies and helps you comply with the EU GDPR cookie law and CCPA regulations.

Genesis Simple Edits
This plugin creates a new Genesis settings page that allows you to modify the post-info (byline), post-meta, and footer area on any Genesis theme.

iThemes Security ( free and pro )
iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) gives you over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day. WordPress sites can be an easy target for attacks because of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.

OneSignal ( free and pro )
OneSignal is an easy way to increase user engagement. Use OneSignal to send visitors targeted push notifications so they keep coming back. It takes just a few minutes to install.

Pretty Links ( free and pro )
Pretty Links helps you shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look how you want using your own domain name!

Rank Math SEO
SEO is the most consistent source of traffic for any website. We created Rank Math, a WordPress SEO plugin, to help every website owner get access to the SEO tools they need to improve their SEO and attract more traffic to their website.

Really Simple SSL
Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL.

Smush ( free and pro )
Optimize your images turn on lazy load, resize, compress and improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!

Social Warfare (free and pro)
Get more social shares which can lead to more website traffic with the best WordPress social sharing plugin! Built by a group of social media marketing experts and world class developers who are obsessed with performance.

Ultimate Blocks
Ultimate Blocks is a Gutenberg blocks Plugin for bloggers and marketers. Their goal is to make it insanely easy for you to create better and engaging content with Gutenberg.

UpdraftPlus ( free and pro )
UpdraftPlus simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently-active installs. Backup your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!

WP Rocket ( premium only )
Make WordPress load fast in a few clicks. WP Rocket reduces the weight of your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files through minification. Lighter files means faster load time!

Asset CleanUp ( free and pro )
Don’t just minify & combine CSS/JavaScript files ending up with large, bloated and slow loading pages: Strip the “fat” first and get a faster website. For instance, you might use a plugin that generates contact forms and it loads its assets (.CSS and .JS files) in every page of your website instead of doing it only in the /contact page (if that’s the only place where you need it).

WPS Hide Login
WPS Hide Login is a very light plugin that lets you easily and safely change the url of the login form page to anything you want. It doesn’t literally rename or change files in core, nor does it add rewrite rules.

Remember to always back up your website before installing new plugins. Let me know what WordPress plugins you use to help rank your content.

Thanks for the plugin suggestions!

I highly recommend GTranslate or the Weglot plugin for translating a website into multiple languages quickly for FREE search engine traffic in a lot of cases. Low-competition niche in English means easy rankings in all other languages.

Such an easy way of getting more relevant traffic to your site if your product is able to be sold worldwide.

Bookmarked... This is why I spend more time on BHW. Lots of people trying to help other people.

Thank you mate..

Wordfence is a better plugin than ithemes

Haha, yeah.. install them all...


Or just follow the best practices (as for example... no chmoding all the files to to 777, no uploading script without server-side validation, not trusting user inputs, always using prepared sql queries, using strong passwords..etc) and have a fast and secure site without extra plugins.

Good list, but you should also include wordfence, it might not be SEO directly but it's essential.

Sweely said:

Thanks for the plugin suggestions!

I highly recommend GTranslate or the Weglot plugin for translating a website into multiple languages quickly for FREE search engine traffic in a lot of cases. Low-competition niche in English means easy rankings in all other languages.

Such an easy way of getting more relevant traffic to your site if your product is able to be sold worldwide.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip.

Mr Positive said:

Wordfence is a better plugin than ithemes

Click to expand...

Many bloggers like Wordfence and you are correct it is a better plugin based on the add ons but I don't use it because it is to bloated and slows down my website. However I get great results with iThemes. Thanks for stopping by.

Panther28 said:

Good list, but you should also include wordfence, it might not be SEO directly but it's essential.

Click to expand...

Great tip your are correct WordFence is good but I acutally only included plugins I'm currently using. I avoid WordFence because the plugin is bloated and slows down my website. Thanks for stopping by.

you must add ShortPixel optimizer